This paper will relate everyday experiences of young people living in foster care in France and England, and who have faced disruptions in their care settings. Their descriptions of what is important in their own lives show how they deal with interruptions of relationships which have been decided for them.
Data has been collected in the frame of a Marie Curie-funded research at the University of Sussex in 2013-2014. This project included innovative qualitative methods designed to give young people in care the control over what they wished to talk about, the overall theme being their experiences of everyday life. 16 French and English young people aged 14 to 18 and living in foster and residential care, were interviewed up to three times in a span of three months. They were asked to draw maps of places important to them, to take the researcher on a guided walk, and to make pictures of things, places, and people important in their everyday lives. When young people agreed, their carers were interviewed as well. The data includes 76 interviews in French and English. This presentation will draw on data from five young people who have talked about interruptions in their previous foster placements, and from two who have just come into care.
Young people’s accounts highlight disruptions of relationships as a major topic they deal with in their everyday lives. This applies to relationships with parents, brothers and sisters, with friends, and in some cases, with foster carers as well. For adolescents, changing the family environment and the place where they go to school has significant consequences in terms of the energy and time they need to invest in making new relationships. But they also think a lot about previous relationships, and often find creative ways of maintaining those which seem valuable to them. Here the part played by digital technologies is crucial, because they give young people opportunities to manage their relationships as they wish, even at a distance. Social medias also allow teenagers to escape the control of adults – especially child protection practitioners. Maintaining contacts with valuable adults and peers, who have been important in their lives, appears to be a way of constructing or strengthening their social networks.
These results remind us that at the period of adolescence, it is not only the change of foster placement, but any change of environment, including coming into care, that causes deep instability. From the perspective of young people, the most problematic about changing places and environments is to maintain and reconstruct a social network that will help them build their own identities and give support when needed. Young people who live in care and have experienced recent changes in their life settings spend considerable time, energy, and emotions on relationships with adults and peers, be it in their birth family, in their foster families, or at school. In this regard, digital technologies and social medias appear to be extremely useful tools, maybe even more important for young people in care than for others.
Family foster care and adoption , Residential child care
